ISR News Feed

The Beloit CollegeInformation Services and Resources (ISR) Divisionprovides access to information resources, supports their use, and serves as a center for engaged learning. Staff located in Mayer Hall and Col. Robert H. Morse Library and Richard Black Information Center collaborate and consult with faculty, students, and staff to provide a learning and living environment dedicated to the cultivation of liberally educated persons.

TheLibraryprovides access to the online catalog (BELCAT), a rich collection of electronic resources, and information about Beloit College Library services.

Information Technology (IT)provides technology resources and services to students, faculty, and staff. Policies related to technology purchases, the Academic Technology Fund Plan (ATF) for faculty equipment replacements and other Library and IT services can be found on theISR Plans and Policiespage.

April was a productive month for the Jenzabar project team. Three weeks of training were completed by module managers and users as well as the second data pass from Datatel Colleague to Jenzabar EX. May brings focus to the configuration of the web portal. Click herefor a full project update.

Do you have library items that are due?
All materials borrowed from our library, the Beloit Public Library,
UW-Madison Libraries, and through interlibrary loan can be returned to
the Beloit College Library Circulation Desk before you leave campus.

We are pleased to announce that the web committee recently approved enabling Google+ and Blogger in Beloit College’s Google Apps for Education (GAE) environment. These applications are a welcome addition to Beloit's GAE environment, as we have already had requests from a number of faculty who wish to use them in their classes. You should now see these applications as options on the list in the top-right-hand corner of the screen when you are logged into any of Beloit's GAE applications.

Data, data, data and training, training, training! These were the themes for the Jenzabar project team during the month of March as the group prepared for another data pass and another round of training. Visit the Jenzbar Project website for a full project update.

Moodle Groups has mistakenly sent out an automated welcome message to all users. I did not send this to you. Please disregard this message and do not use the information contained in the message. The system authentication is set to use your Beloit username and password - the part of your email address before the "@" symbol and the same password as your email account. You should be able to login using your current username and password. I am working to determine why this occurred and ensure that it does not happen again. Feel free to contact me with any questions you may have.

EBSCOhost databases (Newspaper Source, Academic Search Premier, OmniFile, Art Full Text) are temporarily unavailable due to maintenance being performed by the database provider. We are assured that EBSCOhost engineers are working to restore access as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience!

BELCAT is currently unavailable while staff work to configure new services. Library staff is available to assist with discovery and borrowing of collection materials. Please contact the Circulation desk (x2300), Reference desk (x2544) or Chat/IM 'Ask a Librarian' with any questions.

Moodle at Beloit College is changing for the better! Support for our current version of Moodle (1.9.x) will end in June. As a result we need to upgrade to the next version, 2.x. The current plan is to create a test instance this semester, test over the summer, and implement in Fall 2012

The team checked off a major milestone in February/beginning of March by completing Training Trip 3. Training Trip 3 provided basic daily operations training and was a first introduction to Jenzabar EX for many outside of the project team. Perhaps the biggest accomplishment of Training Trip 3 was the Financial Aid office going live with their new software, PowerFAIDS. Jenzabar training continues the last two weeks in March. For a full update, check out the Jenzabar Implementation Project website.

The Jenzabar project team remained hard at work during the month of January. Jenzabar consultants completed the first pass of data from Datatel Colleague to Jenzabar EX and the project team has been tasked with reviewing this data for accuracy. The next step is a three week long training trip starting on February 13th. For a full project update, check out theJenzabar Implementation Project website.